INSEE has just announced that, for the first time in 2025, there should be more deaths in France than births. This major demographic change is called upon to last, and it brings hexagon back to the standard of its European neighbors – which, like it, make fewer and fewer children.
Does this mean that France would be rid of its shortage of recurrent housing and that it would be enough for it to mobilize the vacant housing here or there instead of trying to reverse the construction curve, which dropped to less than 300,000 new dwellings per year?
Alas, things are not so simple. Despite this substantive demographic development, France still needs to produce around 400,000 new dwellings per year for at least a decade, for reasons which are due to the evaluation of “housing needs”, much more complex to establish than the birth / death comparison.
Thanks to a study of government statistical services (SDES), which this year updated the analysis of these housing needs with regard to the latest demographic trends, we see more clearly on this highly political subject.
Household size, migration, poor housing: many variables
The housing requirements are not limited (at all) to the birth / death comparison because, as soon as we talk about housing, it is necessary to count in households more than individuals. However, households are increasingly small, we can have an increase in the number of households (and therefore available housing) despite a declining population.
In addition, it is necessary to add migration, much more difficult to assess in the future than the number of births since they depend in particular on major international crises. You also have to think about internal migration: if all the inhabitants of eastern France come to live in the west, we will generally have the same number of households in France, but an increased need for housing to the west – the East vacant housing cannot be transferred to it …
It is necessary to model the number of additional housing required to resolve the current housing shortage
The same must be integrated the fleet renewal requirements (all unsuitable accommodation cannot be renovated) and vacant housing flows and secondary residences.
Above all, it is necessary to model the number of additional housing necessary to resolve the shortage of current housing, which reflects the growing number of private people from housing or living in overcrowding, degraded housing or accommodation in a third party.
The SDES is quite cautious in its conclusions, and does not deliver a figure of housing needs, but gives several variables by leaving the reader to decide the hypotheses and to make the additions accordingly. It is based on the population projections of INSEE which predict a peak of individuals around 2035 and a number of households which begins to stagnate in the 2040s (after a planned increase of 4 million households compared to today in the central scenario, increased almost entirely due to the rise in households of a single person).
Compared to the latest costing of 2012, the SDES refined its methods, taking into account the territorialization of needs, internal migrations, the requirement of the current “stock” of unhealthy people, the possible mobilization of secondary residences or vacant housing …
Housing in equation
Personal conclusion, by cutting off some hypotheses: over the current period 2020-2030, we would now need each year:
- 208,000 new dwellings per year to accommodate the flow of new households (Central population scenario of INSEE, the high scenario being at 242,000, knowing that INSEE frequently underestimated migratory flows);
- 150,000 new dwellings per year to absorb poor housing in ten years. The rhythm of ten years is a purely political choice, but the SDES says that there are 1.5 million dwellings to be built to absorb the poor housing stock;
- 26,000 second homes;
- 11,500 short -term vacant housing units;
- 27,000 dwellings to replace demolished housing (including divisions / mergers / use changes in both directions between residential and non -residential).
Or, according to these criteria and these SDES figures, a need for 422,500 new dwellings per year (against 290,000 set up this year). In ten years, we will be able to reduce this objective by 50,000 per year (in connection with the demographic drop) and even by 150,000 per year if, by then, we have managed to defeat poor housing in ten years. Needless to say, this is not the way taken right now, all the delay accumulated during this decade will imply a catch -up later.
If we are no longer on needs of 500,000 dwellings per year, totemic figure from the 2000s, we still need more than 400,000
In short, if we are no longer on the needs of 500,000 housing units per year, totemic figure of the 2000s, we still need more than 400,000. This without counting events that are difficult to predict as new wars (in the last ten years, we had to welcome hundreds of thousands of people related to wars in Syria or Ukraine, that no one had been able to anticipate) or an arrival of climatic refugees.
Planning a high range of housing production, it is also preparing to welcome the exiles of tomorrow with dignity instead of reassuring themselves on the cheaply right illusions on an impossible closure of the borders.
A high range is also preparing for climatic events whose consequences are struggling to anticipate: how many people will see their habitat sacrificed by the rise in waters, the decline in the coastline?
How many dwellings will have to be rebuilt, among the ten million houses potentially affected by the clay-boundation (RGA) withdrawal from the multiplication of droughts? How much among the ten million also subject to flood risks? How many dwellings will simply be abandoned in the hottest regions against repeated heat waves?
The future of housing does not easily get into equation, but as they often say, governing it is: 1) predict; 2) Home their people.